As Falvey’s Cat in the Stax, Rebecca writes articles covering a broad range of topics, from academics to hobbies to random events. All the while highlighting how Falvey Library can enhance your Villanova experience!

Happy Wednesday, Wildcats! Last Thursday marked the start of Black History Month, a time to celebrate the accomplishments of African Americans and recognize their role in U.S. history. Black History Month begins on Feb. 1 and ends on Mar. 1. Started by Harvard historian Carter G. Woodson in 1915, the observance was originally known as “Negro History Week.” President Gerald Ford officially established Black History Month in 1976 as a way to acknowledge and honor the contributions and achievements of African Americans. In honor of this annual event, I’ve compiled a list of contemporary Black writers whose work is available at Falvey. Be sure to check out some of these texts!

Alice Walker (Photo by Noah Berger)

Alice Walker

A prolific writer, Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated author, poet, and activist. She has written seven novels, four short story collections, four children’s books, and several volumes of essays and poems. Her work has been translated in over two dozen languages, and her books have sold more than 15 million copies. Her most well-known bestseller is The Color Purple, which was made into a film in 1985 and again this past October. Alice Walker also wrote Everyday Use, and Now is the Time to Open Your Heart. Some of her poetry collections include Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, Horses Make a Landscape Look Beautiful, and Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. 

Colson Whitehead (Photo by Chris Close)

Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead is a graduate of Harvard college who began his writing career by writing reviews for the Village Voice. He published his first novel in 2000 and now has 10 books under his belt. A few of his books are historical fiction novels that look at the past and offer a commentary on the current state of race in America. His novel The Underground Railroad won him a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his book The Nickel Boys. Colson Whitehead is also the author of Harlem Shuffle, Zone One, and Sag Harbor.

Jacqueline Woodson (Photo by Ini Tomeu)

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson is an incredibly prolific writer who writes books for adults, children, and adolescents. She is best known for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming which won her a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2014. She also wrote Another Brooklyn and Red at the Bone. Her stories often address themes like friendship, race, and coming of age. From 2015-2017, Jacqueline Woodson was the Young People’s Poet Laureate, and a year later, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature at the Library of Congress for 2018–2019.

Jericho Brown (Photo by Darnell Wilburn)

Jericho Brown

A professor at Emory University and director of their Creative Writing Program, Jericho Brown is a poet whose poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his poetry collection The Tradition, which explores how we’ve become accustomed to terror in our society. He has also published the poetry collections Please and The New Testament.

In honor of Black History Month, Villanova has organized several events throughout the month of February. Click this link to see the various events the University will be hosting in the upcoming weeks.

Rebecca Amrick is a first year graduate student in the English Department and a Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.

Africana Studies is hosting Dr. Dionne Irving for a public lecture of her work in Falvey Library’s Speakers’ Corner on Monday, Feb. 19, at 5 p.m. The title of Irving’s talk is “Caribbean Women Will Have Their Revenge on the New World.”

Irving is originally from Toronto, Ontario. She is the author of Quint (7.13 Books) and The Islands (Catapult Books). Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. The Islands was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Scotiabank/Giller Prize, The New American Vices Award, and The Clara Johnson Award. Irving teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience at the University of Notre Dame.

Registration is encouraged. RSVP HERE.

This ACS approved event, co-sponsored by the Department of Global Interdisciplinary Studies, the Department of English, and Falvey Library, is free and open to the public.

View the full calendar of Black History Month events on campus.

Happy Friday, Wildcats! Falvey Library is delivering you another semester of Weekend Recs, a blog dedicated to filling you in on what to read, listen to, and watch over the weekend. Annie, a graduate assistant from the Communication department, scours the internet, peruses the news, and digs through book stacks to find new, relevant, and thought-provoking content that will challenge you and prepare you for the upcoming week. 

Happy Friday, Wildcats! It’s the beginning of February, which means it’s officially Black History Month. Last year, I kicked off Black History Month with some Black independent film recommendations, which you can check out here. This year, I wanted to focus on the history part of the holiday. So, if you want to explore works on Black history and the contributions of Black activists and historical figures in American history (and not just The Help), here are some recommendations to get you started over the weekend.

If you have 5 minutes…and want to learn about the origins of BHM and the theme for this year, read this article.

If you have 15 minutes…and want to learn about some of the most influential Black Americans in history, check out this article. It’s impossible to fit every single history-making Black American into one blog, but this article does a good job of sharing a glimpse into some noteworthy figures we should all know.

If you have 42 minutes and 56 seconds…and like podcasts, listen to “The Fight for a True Democracy,” the first episode of  1619 from the New York Times. The 1619 audio series, along with the other episodes and the subsequent book 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (available to read online through Falvey), reframes the common (racist) narrative of American history to emphasize the importance of Black people in making our country what it is today.

If you have 58 minutes…and want to go on a “disturbing voyage” through racism and racist stereotypes in the United States, watch the documentary Ethnic Notions, available to stream online through Falvey, by the late Marlon Riggs (also known for his more experimental queer poetry film Tongues Untied).

If you have 1 hour and 33 minutes…and are a fan of James Baldwin, watch his award-winning documentary I Am Not Your Negro, available to stream online through Falvey. Baldwin explores his experiences during Civil Rights Movement by focusing on the lives and deaths of his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Dr. King.

Bonus: if you want to watch a recently released movie about the Civil Rights Movement, watch Rustin on Netflix. Starring Colman Domingo, Rustin tells the story of Bayard Rustin, a Civil Rights activist, advisor to Dr. King, and an openly gay Black man. Not only is the topic of this film important to Black history, but Domingo’s Oscar nomination makes him the second openly queer actor to be nominated for playing a queer character and the first Afro-Latino men to ever be nominated for Best Actor.

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

If you have 2 hours and 5 minutes…and love biopics, watch Harriet on Netflix. As the name suggests, this movie follows Harriet Tubman as she escapes slavery and becomes one of the most prolific “conductors” for the Underground Railroad.

Bonus: If you want to see more strong Black women in history on screen, watch The Woman King, highlighting the Agojie warriors of the Dahomey kingdom, on Netflix.

If you have 3 hours…and need something to do this weekend, see Ava DuVernay’s Origin in theaters. The film follows real-life writer Isabel Wilkerson as she writes her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which explores race as a part of a caste system (available to read at Falvey).

Bonus: if you want to check out some of Ava DuVernay’s other films, watch Selma, available in Falvey’s DVD Collection, and 13th on Netflix.

If you have 6 hours…and want to stay on theme this year with “African Americans and the Arts,” read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, one of the most popular works of Black American literature (or just ever) by Maya Angelou, available online through Falvey.

Annie Stockmal is a second-year graduate student in the Communication Department and Graduate Assistant in Falvey Library.

Please join us on Wednesday, March 29, from 12-1:30 p.m. in Falvey Library’s Speakers’ Corner for a workshop titled, “A Womanist Path to Ending White Christian America” featuring Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart. 

The recent murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Daunte Wright, and Patrick Lyoya, and others are only the latest episodes in a brutal history of racial violence in this country — racial violence that is the consequence of a white supremacist system. A troubling part of that reality is that white supremacy is grounded in Christian history, texts, ideas, and institutions. Is Christian faith possible apart from anti-Blackness? In this session, we will explore this question as we contemplate the meaning of the end of “White Christian America.” We will study the liberative possibilities found in womanist theology, a discourse developed by Black women.
 
This session will be facilitated by Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart. Reverend Naomi is an ordained minister, justice advocate, public administrator, and adjunct professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University.
 
This ACS-approved event, co-sponsored by Falvey Library, Center for Peace and Justice Education, and Theology and Religious Studies, is free and open to the public. A light lunch will be served.

My case for DCDE’s spring exhibit, “Poetic License: Seven Curators’ Poetry Selections from Distinctive Collections” focuses on American dialect poetry in our collections. Dialect poetry is a style of writing that attempts to replicate the sound and speech patterns of people from a particular region or social group. It has often been regarded with mixed feelings – enjoying immense popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but existing mostly outside of the literary canon. When we read these depictions of speech today our initial reaction is likely one of cringe-inducing disgust or dismissal. Yet these examples can be used by students, faculty, and researchers to think critically and open discourse on topics such as racism, stereotypes and bias, the immigrant experience (historically, as well as today), cultural appropriation and authenticity, and to promote cultural awareness and sensitivity.

The case highlights three particular poets writing in this style:

T. A. (Thomas Augustine) Daly, 1871-1948:

Daly attended Villanova College from 1880-1887 and went on to enjoy a prolific career in publishing and newspapers. Villanova holds several copies of his volumes, which sold widely, reaching numerous editions. Daly was best known for his humorous verse written primarily in Italian-American or Irish-American dialect. Critics and reviews in his day generally noted his portrayals of immigrant characters as distinguished by sympathy and understanding rather than as harmful or offensive.

Learn more about T.A. Daly in a previous online exhibit here: https://exhibits.library.villanova.edu/t-a-daly

Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872-1906:

During his short life, Paul Laurence Dunbar published twelve books of poetry, four novels, and four books of short stories. He is regarded as one of the first African American literary figures to gain national and international recognition. Briefly married to Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson (1874-1935), a fellow writer later known for her activism in women’s rights, he died of tuberculosis at age thirty-three.

To a largely white audience, Dunbar’s dialect poetry, written in a style associated with Black speech of the antebellum American South, was seen as “authentic,” though he was born and educated in Dayton, Ohio. For Dunbar, this style of dialect was no more natural than it was for other popular writers also known for the style, such as Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Distinctive Collections holds several copies of illustrated volumes of Dunbar’s poetry first published by Dodd, Mead, and Co. between 1899 and 1904. These lovely editions are illustrated with photographs by the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) Camera Club, with book cover and interior decorations by noted book designers Alice Morse (1863-1961) and Margaret Armstrong (1867-1944).

Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy,” from Lyrics of the Hearthside (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1899) later inspired the title to Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1969).

James Whitcomb Riley, 1849-1916:

One of the most well-known and best-selling poets at the time of dialect poetry’s height of popularity was James Whitcomb Riley. Known as the “National Poet,” the “Hoosier Poet,” or “Children’s Poet,” for his Indiana-based Midwest regional dialect, his homespun poetry was often humorous and sentimental. Riley began his career writing for newspapers and gained fame performing and reading his poetry on traveling public speaking circuits. Two of his best loved poems are “The Raggedy Man” and “Little Orphant Annie.”

Be sure to stop by Falvey’s first floor to see the entire exhibit in person this spring and watch the blog for most posts from the curators!

Rebecca Oviedo is Distinctive Collections Archivist at Falvey Memorial Library.

“Poetic License” is now on display on the Library’s first floor. The exhibit features poems selected from Falvey Library’s Distinctive Collections. Seven curators were given “poetic license” to curate an exhibit case; selecting specific materials to tell a unique story. Rebecca Oviedo, Distinctive Collections Archivist, focused on American Dialect Poetry, “a style of writing that attempts to replicate the sound and speech patterns of people from a particular region or social group.” Pictured above is Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy” from his book Lyrics of the Hearthside (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1899). “This poem later inspired the title to Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).”

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Memorial Library.

Happy Friday, Wildcats! Falvey Library is delivering you another semester of Weekend Recs, a blog dedicated to filling you in on what to read, listen to, and watch over the weekend. Annie, a graduate assistant from the Communication department, scours the internet, peruses the news, and digs through book stacks to find new, relevant, and thought-provoking content that will challenge you and prepare you for the upcoming week. 

Wednesday marked the beginning of February, or Black History Month, a month dedicated to sharing and honoring the histories of Black Americans and the African diaspora. One such history is that of Black independent film in the United States.

Photo by Matt Moloney on Unsplash

Movies are a large and enduring cultural staple in the U.S., and Black filmmakers have been a vital yet underrepresented (and underappreciated) force in the film industry. In fact, Black independent film companies have been driving forces since the 1920s, a history that is often overshadowed by the (very white) studio system images of early Hollywood. This weekend’s recs will shed some light on some key moments in Black independent film history.

If you have 10 minutes…and want the sparknotes on Black independent film history, read this article.

If you have 15 minutes…and want to learn about an anti-Hollywood Black film movement from history, read Ntongela Masilela’s “The Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers,” the seventh chapter in Black American Cinema, available at Falvey. This 1970s movement dubbed the “L.A. Rebellion” was heavily inspired by Third Cinema and largely utilized black and white film.

Bonus: if you’re into indie and art-house cinema, watch Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep from the L.A. Rebellion movement, available in Falvey’s DVD Collection.

If you have 18 minutes…and are asking yourself what counts as a “Black film,” read Tommy L. Lott’s “A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema,” available online through Falvey. It brings up some thought-provoking dilemmas on how scholars conceptualize and study Black films.

If you have 30 minutes…and want to read about one of the earliest films to tackle racism and lynching, in response to the horrific Birth of a Nation, read Jane Gaines’s “Fire and Desire: Race, Melodrama, and Oscar Micheaux,” the third chapter in Black American Cinema, available at Falvey.

Bonus: if you want to check out one of the earliest Black independent feature-length films, watch Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates, available through inter-library loan.

Photo from Pamela Ferrell on Wikimedia Commons

If you have 1 hour and 30 minutes…and enjoy the mockumentary style, watch Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, available online through Falvey. The film follows Cheryl, who plays a version of herself, as she makes a documentary film trying to find the identity of a Black queer actress from the 1930s, dubbed “The Watermelon Woman.” This Black queer classic is genuinely enjoyable and, as a bonus, is even set and filmed in Philadelphia.

If you have 1 hour and 52 minutes…and are a fan of artsy period pieces, watch Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. This film, the first film (ever) directed by a Black women to get a general theatrical release in the U.S. in 1991, dedicated by Dash to Black women in particular, tells the story of a Gullah family during the Great Migration who is faced with the choice to stay on Saint Helena Island, their familial home, or leave for mainland America. Daughters of the Dust also features non-Western storytelling techniques, Gullah culture and language (I would recommend subtitles to get the full experience), and absolutely gorgeous cinematography.

Bonus: If you’re a fan of one of the most iconic Black independent filmmakers of all time, Spike Lee, watch Do the Right Thing (a personal favorite of mine) and BlacKkKlansman, both available online through Falvey.

Annie Stockmal is a graduate student in the Communication Department and graduate assistant in Falvey Library. 

Falvey Memorial Library’s Dig Deeper series explores topics of importance in our society and the news. It connects these subjects with resources available through the Library, so our faculty, students, and staff can explore and learn more, potentially sparking new research and scholarship.

Photo courtesy of WikiMedia Commons

Sidney Poitier, the first ever African American actor to win an Oscar for Best Actor (lead), was an iconic figure in both film history and Black history, which is celebrated each year in February.

Sidney Poitier’s story is still one that has been revered as a success-story of hard work and exceptionalism against the constraints of a Hollywood landscape that was by no means welcoming to Black actors. As detailed in Goudsouzian’s biography Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon, after moving to America, Poitier was mocked at his first theater audition in Harlem for his strong Bahamanian accent and difficulty reading. Fueled by this reaction, he reportedly picked up a few newspapers that day and taught himself to read and speak without his accent.

His determination, hard work, and new Americanized self-made persona landed him several successful auditions, and eventually, after securing his first lead role in Blackboard Jungle, Poitier was one of the most notable Black actors working in Hollywood in the 1950s and 60s, a time when Black film-making and acting in Hollywood reached a particular low point.

Poitier received his first Academy Award nomination for his role in 1958’s The Defiant Ones. His historic Academy Award victory came a few years later for his role in Lilies of the Field (1963). By 1967, he proved to have the biggest box office draw in Hollywood, with his films In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, and To Sir, With Love.

Photo courtesy of WikiMedia Commons

Nicknamed the “Ebony Saint,” the majority of his roles were double-edged swords, depictions of Black exceptionalism to the extreme, leading to his persona facing criticisms. Namely, Black critics argued that his roles did not represent the social reality of Black people in America, as detailed by Arthur Knight.

Ultimately, with the coinciding rise of Black power politics and the Blaxploitation film cycle in the early 1970s, the pendulum swung the other way, and Black actors began to play action-hero roles rife with vengeful masculinity and overt sexuality.

Some saw Poitier for his individual exceptionalism and self-made success, an image of hope that the American Dream was real and integration was possible. Others saw him in relation to what he was up against, a Black star at the whims of white Hollywood elites, a man tasked with being one of the sole representations of Blackness in Hollywood.

Yet, Poitier’s dramatic talent is something that fans and critics alike largely agree upon. Sidney Poitier was an actor by trade and talent, and he was able to masterfully portray the characters he was given. And, as Knight argues, despite the restrictiveness of his roles, Poitier was even able to subtly rebel in his acting, adding in glimpses of pleasure.

Thus, even a year after his death, Poitier is still revered by many for his work. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, one of Poitier’s famous films, even just got its third iteration, with You People starring, among others, Eddie Murphy and Jonah Hill.

Dig deeper and explore the links below for more on Sidney Poitier.

Find resources on Sidney Poitier at Falvey:

• Poitier’s autobiographies, This Life and The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography
  
• Goudsouzian’s biography, Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon
  
• Blackboard Jungle (1955)
• Stars of the Silver Screen, “Sidney Poitier” (2011)
• Arthur Knight’s “Sidney Poitier: It is No Great Joy to Be a Symbol” in New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s
• Poitier Revisited: Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age

Other resources on Poitier:

• Sidney (2022) available on Apple TV+
• In the Heat of the Night (1967)
• Lilies of the Field (1963)

Annie Stockmal is a graduate student in the Communication Department and graduate assistant in Falvey Library.

By Ethan Shea

On Feb. 8 and 15, Theology and Religious Studies Professor the Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart gave the Villanova community two exciting opportunities to partake in a guided reading of the Bible with Black ways of knowing and being in mind. The first session focused on passages from the Old Testament while the second analyzed excerpts of the New Testament. This talk was especially timely, as Villanova continues to celebrate Black History Month.

An important aspect of the discussion was the decentering of Biblical narratives. The Rev. Washington-Leapheart encouraged the audience to consider how characters placed on the outskirts of stories would have been impacted. To practice such a reading, it is necessary to acknowledge the baggage readers and the Bible itself carries. Even today, the Bible is used to push specific narratives that are tied to various political ideologies. Everyone reads texts from unique perspectives, and similarly, the Bible cannot be separated from its past, which the Rev. Washington-Leapheart points out can be problematic.

In addition to decentering, placing the Bible in conversation with current issues impacting Black communities across the globe, such as police brutality, is a critical feature of reading the Bible in Black.

A specific moment of close reading that stood out to me involved Genesis 15:18-21. In these verses, the Lord gives Abram land that belongs to the Kenites, Kenizzites, and Kadmonites among many other groups. Rather than rejoicing about Abram’s acquisition, Rev. Washington-Leapheart led the crowd to consider the plight of the Kenites, Kenizzites, and Kadmonites. Would they have seen this gift from the Lord as a blessing? By reframing the way we read the Bible, the narrative that has been established through years of social and cultural immersion can be flipped.

Falvey is glad to have had the opportunity to host such an insightful conversation. Both installments of these talks will soon be available to view on both Falvey Library and Villanova University’s YouTube channels.

Part I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n6V-6RjU-4&list=PLfEia0djpea2PzmiTKDHzL3rftL6qwFOF&index=2

Part II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPK1J8MrELc&list=PLfEia0djpea2PzmiTKDHzL3rftL6qwFOF&index=1

Ethan Shea is a first-year English Graduate Student at Villanova University and Graduate Assistant at Falvey Memorial Library.